The Big Short Story

The title "Aguantando" means "holding on." I think this is a very fitting title as this story revolves around the theme of Yunior and his whole family holding onto the possibility of Papi coming home. Yunior has relatively no memory of his father as Papi left the family for New York when Yunior was only four years old. The first line of this story is Yunior explicitly stating that he "lived without a father for the first nine years of my life." The closest thing to a "memory" Yunior has are pictures of his father and there's one in particular that stands out to him. It's a photograph of Papi in a uniform before Yunior was born. Yunior likens Papi's unsmiling his to his own. Yunior's family lives in very poor conditions--even poorer than the community around them. However they're still above the people living in the campo or who were Haitian immigrants. From previous stories, we know that Papi is living in the states while th

I am a huge fan of the teenage drama genre, so I loved this short story. However, I had no idea what was going on for a good chunk of the story. I had to read many parts over a few times before I started to grasp the crazy futuristic world that Hero and the narrator lived in. The first show this story reminded me of was  Black Mirror . "Valley of the Girls" has that eerie futuristic vibe to it that is a signature of  Black Mirror  episodes. The story is a critique and analysis of social media, teenage youth, and wealth as the characters live in one huge social media simulation. The kids come from extremely privileged backgrounds and their parents are over-protective of what people will think about their kids. It's like the show  Gossip Girl . Gossip Girl  is a teenage drama that revolves around the extravagant lives of privileged upper-east side teens. Just like the characters in "Valley of the Girls," the teens in  Gossip Girl  party, do drugs, and drink al

"Sonny's Blues" has been one of my favorite stories in Going to Meet the Man  so far. I enjoyed watching the narrator and Sonny's relationship unfold. The whole story builds up to Sonny's performance at the nightclub with the narrator watching him play for the first time. This scene was very powerful, and especially touching in the context of the series of events leading up to it. The narrator has an almost strained relationship with Sonny. He does not agree with Sonny's lifestyle and aspirations to be a musician. When Sonny tells the narrator that he wants to be a musician, the narrator assumes Sonny means a concert pianist. The narrator has a pre-disposed view of jazz, wondering why his brother would "want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowing around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around a dance floor" (Sonny's Blues, 121). To him, jazz is almost beneath Sonny in some way. The narrator's reaction to Sonny'

Ever since we found out that Walt in "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was the brother of Seymour Glass from "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," I've been trying to find links between all the stories. My most promising theory is that Seymour Glass is Sergeant X in "For Esmé — with Love and Squalor." When I was reading "For Esmé," I couldn't help but draw similarities between the two, or at least what I envisioned Seymour to be like before the war.  At the beginning of "For Esmé," the narrator mentions his wife, "a breaktakingly levelheaded girl" and a mother-in-law who's "not getting any younger" (For Esmé 87). Seymour also has a wife, Muriel, and a mother-in-law. Something about the way Sergeant X mentions his mother-in-law reminds me of how Seymour's relationship with his mother-in-law would be like. Sergeant X says that he doesn't get to see his mother-in-law much, so he doesn't want to cancel h

When I first read "The Laughing Man," I didn't pick up on the possibility of Mary being pregnant and losing the baby. After Michelle explained her theory on the sudden break-up between Mary and Chief in class, I started picking up on the story's little details that could be alluding to a pregnancy. You should read her blogpost about it here , and this blogpost is like a continuation of it with my theories on what really happened. Mary and Chief are two people dating. From the picture of her in the cap and gown hanging in the Chief's bus, I would say that she's about the same age as Chief who's 22-23. She's from Long Island while he's from Staten Island, so they meet up in Manhattan as a halfway point. I think that Mary's dentist appointments are just an excuse for her to see the Chief or even hook up, so I don't believe that she's pregnant at this point. I'm not sure what being pregnant was like in the US during the 1940s, but I d

Learning that Tim did not have a child named Kathleen, let alone a daughter, was a shock. I had become attached to the character of Kathleen from this quote of Tim's, "I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I'm still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it's an obsession, that I should write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a Shetland pony." I can relate to Kathleen when she says that Tim writes too much about war, but maybe that's because I'm biased as I dislike war stories and movies. The sentiment of a daughter telling her father to write about a girl who gets a pony resonated with my younger self's wishes. Then there's the cute father-daughter trip to Vietnam in the story "Field Trip." Kathleen's curiosity with the culture and land of Vietnam but disinterest of the significance of the Vietnam War is innocent. After doing some research on Tim to figure out what else